Gordon Haskett fielding questions on odds of activist at Dollar General

With Dollar Tree (DLTR) having fallen about 22% and Dollar General (DG) having lost nearly 25% of its value over the last month, Gordon Haskett’s head of event-driven research, Don Bilson, notes the firm has been asked in recent days whether it thinks an activist “could jump on DG now that it’s washing out.” In that context, the firm notes that Dollar Tree already has an activist in Mantle Ridge and says “whether one of the usual suspects is willing to bet on (Jeffrey) Owen doing the same (by successfully executing a self-improvement plan) is TBD.” Ed Garden, who left Trian this year, is “someone who might have an interest in DG,” says the firm, which adds that “Carl Icahn was both a pre-merger Family Dollar holder and a post-merger Dollar Tree investor, though we don’t see him as a threat to do much of anything right now.”